The present invention relates to optical scanner devices useful for optical character recognition functions, and more particularly to a hand-held apparatus adapted to provide the dual function of optical character recognition for selective data entry and X-Y position indication for display cursor and computer control.
Optical scanners have become well known for optical character recognition (OCR) functions. Such scanners may take the form of hand-held devices coupled to a data receiving terminal, with the operator scanning the apparatus over an image, such as a bar code or line of text, so as to provide an electrical signal which represents a recognized character or sequence of characters. Such hand-held devices include the wand disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,088,981. Caere Corporation, Los Gatos, California, is understood to market its PC Scanner System for reading bar codes with an optical scanner connected to an IBM personal computer.
Another type of hand-held control device which has come into common use in the past decade is the functional control device used with a computer-controlled display terminal, commonly referred to as a "computer mouse." The mouse is used as an indirect pointing device with an interactive display computer system to control cursor movement by manipulating the mouse over a work surface, the mouse providing relative X-Y position data to the computer system to control the position of the cursor on the display. Examples of such computer mouse devices are shown in U.S. Pats. 4,464,652 and 3,835,464.
The functions of the computer mouse are used extensively, for example, to control the operation of the MacIntosh personal computer marketed by Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, Calif. The operation of this computer is menu driven, with various pull-down menus display to the user, and a particular function selected by positioning the cursor over a desired function description or ikon.
The amount of space allocated to office workers engaged in data entry functions is limited due to budgetary and space productivity requirements. Heretofore, it has been necessary to provide a separate hand-held optical scanner wand device for attachment to a computer terminal device for optical character recognition, and if the computer terminal is so adapted, a separate computer mouse device for controlling the position of the cursor on the terminal and control the computer. The requirement for two separate peripheral devices to perform the two functions is inefficient in space usage. The use of separate peripheral devices is also inefficient in the sense of user productivity, since the user may in some applications be shifting between the optical scanner wand, the computer mouse device and device keyboard.
None of the optical scanners in use today are known to provide the capability of OCR scanning as well as the X-Y position and cursor control capability of the computer mouse. For many applications, it would be advantageous to provide a single apparatus for providing the dual function of OCR scanning and computer mouse operation.